Re: [HACKERS] Anyone for prettyprinted EXPLAIN VERBOSE?

wieck(at)debis(dot)com (Jan Wieck) writes:
> I'm only in doubt about if anyone at all DOES use the pretty
> printed version for anything. I assume I'm not too bad in
> reading printed parsetrees, but whenever the pretty printed
> tree exceeds some hundreds of lines, I'm totally lost and am
> unable to find the location I'm looking for (what I easily do
> when looking at the compressed format). I allways wondered
> why the pretty print was implemented at all.

To each his own poison, I guess. Reverse the above one hundred eighty
degrees, and it's my opinions ;-). But if you like the compressed
layout better, sure, we can keep supporting it. How about we implement
a SET VARIABLE control to select compact or pretty-printed mode, but
still send the same format to both postmaster log and client? My main
gripe is there's no way at present to see the pretty-printed mode
without going to the postmaster log, which might not be readily
available to ordinary users.

(Actually, it's not clear to me why the postmaster log should get
these entries at all; for the most part it's just waste of log
space to send EXPLAIN outputs to the log...)

> So who else does like the pretty printed version better for
> non-esthetical reasons?

Uh, esthetics is everything in this case, isn't it? Either you
find the format pleasing/readable, or not.

regards, tom lane